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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26199367">venus trine mars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal/pseuds/fatal'>fatal</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>venus 金星 planet of love [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Haikyuu!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Friends With Benefits, Italy, M/M, Post-Timeskip, baby your sag venus is showing, tobio pov, tobio: yes i yearn. often i sit...and yearn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:13:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>15,468</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26199367</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal/pseuds/fatal</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>even if two worlds away and farther still</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kageyama Tobio/Kunimi Akira</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>venus 金星 planet of love [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1705384</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>368</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>venus trine mars</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6cAw1W8GLSC4JRl4PkIvVU?si=rqITeBhnTQ-VeoT84nuXUg">heaven is a place on earth with you</a>
</p><p>i hope u enjoy the finale &lt;3</p><p>  <a href="https://twitter.com/ajuyikes/status/1331110764023726080">the blue portrait by min ♡ </a><br/><a href="https://twitter.com/kiyoomibug/status/1305705298318028800">sexy kunimi art by via ♡</a></p><p>cw: implied sexual content, implied recreational drug use, smoking, alcohol</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <h2>
  <b>I</b>
</h2><p>
  <em>There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.</em>
</p><p> <em> — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities</em></p><p> </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Tell me about Rome,” Akira says, warm and close to Tobio’s ear.</p><p>Tobio thinks first of <em> Parco Savello, </em> a bitter orange grove perched atop Aventine Hill. Thinks of its stone walls and trees and pastel view, which swept across the Tiber River and rendered Rome in miniature. He’d spent so much time walking there from his bohemian apartment in Trastevere, and all for a single hour of the night. All for a single shade of blue in the sky—whistling past and gone again, quick as the sweet perfume of oranges that he knew would fade from his clothes come morning.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio’s teammates in Rome told him all sorts of love stories. <em> Italy’s a nation of romantics, </em> they’d reasoned. They spoke about <em> Inferno</em> and rumours of a poem born from the gaze Dante exchanged with his lover, Beatrice, only moments before her death. In dreams Dante braced winding paths through stages of Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, and all in an effort just to see her again. All that peril for only a gaze.</p><p>The hallway between the airplane’s curtained mouth and the arrivals aisle of Haneda Airport had stretched on for so, so long. So had the bird-less sky between Rome and Tokyo. Coming back to Japan felt like stepping along a stilted bridge, thin and steep between two worlds, and then into another one.</p><p>“Did you miss me?” Akira’s eyes are opaque, unreadable.</p><p>Out of Akira’s mouth, any question asking how anyone’s feeling ends up sounding like a trick question. Especially this question. Especially this.</p><p>Tobio doesn’t respond right away. Instead, he gives himself permission to look at Akira from a safe distance—in person, in the flesh, brash and indulgent in a way he hasn’t looked at him or anyone for more than a year. His breath goes still at just the image of him, perfect and neat beneath airport fluorescents.</p><p>Akira is always so mirage-like. Tobio is always afraid that drawing too near will make him disappear entirely.</p><p>“Don’t be so shy.” Akira’s voice surprises Tobio with its softness. “It’s just me. Come closer.”</p><p>Tobio stays unmoving for only a moment longer. Rolling luggage in tow, Tobio strides forward. Five feet away, a foot away, five inches away. An inch away. Then Akira’s in front of him and the dark of his eyes is the only dark in the world to exist.</p><p>Tobio brings a fingertip beside Akira’s ear, draws a long line down the plane of his cheek. He tilts his head and presses his nose into the soft of Akira’s neck, just below the line of his jaw, breathes in, forgets himself. He gives himself permission to.</p><p>“I missed this,” Tobio answers finally, low into warm skin.</p><p>He doesn't know how okay this is, doesn't know how real this is. But Tobio smiles anyway when he hears the short falter in Akira’s breathing. After so many months and miles apart, that slim moment of space between breath feels more than real enough. Tobio presses a furtive kiss to the line of Akira’s jaw.</p><p>“And this.” Another one, soft against his cheek. “And this.” Corner of his mouth. “And this.” Full mouth.</p><p>“Kageyama.” Akira leans into the press of his touch, sighing.</p><p>“Kunimi.” Tobio knows his next words will be a mistake. Knows that asking Akira, of all people, to pick him up was a mistake. And yet he’s asked. And yet he says, still at the corner of Akira’s mouth, “I can show you how much I’ve missed this. If you’ll let me.”</p><p>“You’re disgusting,” Akira says, but he turns his head to hide away a small smirk. “Come on now. Everyone’s waiting for you.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The first time Tobio crossed the Piazza del Campidoglio, built imperious overtop Capitoline Hill, he’d stopped to stare at the Capitoline Wolf at its centre. Bronze children under a heavier bronze she-wolf, stance protective as if they were her own cubs. All wolf’s blood and not human at all. When he stopped to gaze at it, his teammate brought a hand to his shoulder and laughed in Italian, <em> that’s just a replica, you know. The real one’s inside the museum. </em></p><p>Still, it was beautiful and bronze and imposing, even if only an imitation. Tobio stared another second and nodded once, made his way across the blue cobblestone plaza.</p><p>
  <em> Yes, blue cobblestone — did you know Michelangelo designed this square?” </em>
</p><p>A stone ocean spread out below his feet, ripple-like lines of white paint darting circular from the Wolf. Classical architecture curled at the edges of the square like ivory brackets, stilted white shoreline. At a dim enough hour a much younger child could mistake the old cobblestone for a mirror of the sky, blue gazing at blue gazing at blue.</p><p>Tobio once dreamt the square empty of people and sound, wide blue unblemished and defiant in its strangeness. He imagined Akira dancing a spiral ‘round the heavy, bronze Wolf, all neat, perfect lines of a body desired, hair unswept by wind whipping flag-like in the air.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“<em>Okaeri, Kageyama!” </em></p><p>A wave of sound hits Tobio’s ear soon as he opens the door to his apartment. All the lights flicker on. Powder blue helium balloons hover by the high ceiling, long tails of ribbon brushing along the wooden floor.</p><p>Yachi first bounds toward Tobio, pressing her wide grin into the front of his shirt as her arms wrap delicate around him. Hinata approaches him next, warm and laughing into his embrace, followed by Yamaguchi and Kindaichi rushing to join the warm pile. Akira and Tsukishima stand just outside the hug, but somebody’s hands—Hinata’s? Yachi’s?—pull them both into the circle, and everyone’s flushed and grinning with their arms around Tobio, arms around each other.</p><p>He missed them, Tobio realizes. He’s missed everyone so much.</p><p>“<em>Tadaima,”</em> Tobio says, quiet, into the warm pile. The words spread over them all like a balm, halting their tangled limbs and softening their laughter.</p><p>When he’s with them, Tobio doesn’t have to be the national team’s first string setter, or the prodigy champion of Schweiden Adlers, or the foreign setter just recently brought into <em> Ali Roma</em>. He gets to be Tobio. Full stop, no heavy title. For the sweetest minute no other name for him exists; no other person exists except for the people in this room, warm bodies linked by an electric cord of touch.</p><p>“We’ll help you unpack later, Yamayama,” Hinata announces, grinning lopsided, once everyone’s arms have fallen away. Hinata pushes his hair behind an ear, still orange but longer than Tobio remembers seeing on him. “But let’s eat first! I’ve brought an electric grill, and the rice is nearly done. And Kunimi’s prepared all the ingredients for yakiniku!”</p><p>“Oh?” Tobio turns to look at Akira. He stands a short distance away with his hands tucked into the pockets of his hoodie, facing the other direction like he’s not listening in at all. “Kunimi prepared Yakiniku for me?”</p><p>Tobio smiles at the pink that starts to bloom at Akira’s nape. “You mentioned missing yakiniku, you know. When we last talked,” Akira mumbles, begrudging. Tobio faintly hears Tsukishima snort some distance away when Akira adds, “Besides, I had spare keys to your apartment.”</p><p>The evening sun pours violet through the glass of his long windows. Someone’s drawn all the curtains back, windowpanes cracked open to let in the June breeze, let out the smells of grilled meat to come. Someone’s put on a funky Hitomi Tohyama record—Tsukishima, Tobio guesses—overtop the crackling sizzle of meat on a grill.</p><p>Akira steps out from the kitchen holding a long wooden board of meats and raw vegetables, Kindaichi trailing behind him with stacks of small plates. Yachi’s laughing at something Yamaguchi’s said at the corner of the low table set up in the living room. Tsukishima replies with something that makes her laugh even more. Hinata fiddles with the buttons on the grill, tongue stuck out in concentration, oiled barbecue brush gripped precarious in one hand.</p><p>At the sight of them all, Tobio fills with so much gratitude he could burst from it. Warm and powder-blue at the pit of his stomach.</p><p>It’s tradition for them by now—home-cooked, celebratory dinners like these awaiting whoever’s coming home. In a way, Tobio expected it. He still remembers the whirlwind of chaos that went into planning Hinata’s welcome-back-from-Brazil <em> nabe</em>, the blur of voices calling out <em> whose apartment is it gonna be? </em>and <em> not mine, not after you all nearly burned down my kitchen, </em> and <em> I’m sorry Tsukki, I told you I was sorry for that!</em></p><p>Tobio was assigned to go shopping with Kindaichi, cart piling up with beef and pork and blocks of tofu, napa cabbage and daikon and shiitake mushrooms. Kindaichi looked at him funny when Tobio stopped by the sweets aisle, returning with a small, yellow box of <em> Morinaga </em> caramels.</p><p>Yachi’s always insistent on overseeing decorations. Tobio remembers laughing at her visible horror toward whatever gaudy foil banners Yamaguchi picked up from the nearest <em> Seiyu. </em> Then someone broke the balloon pump, the day before Hinata’s arrival. They all spent the night in Tobio’s apartment, inflating orange balloon after orange balloon with nothing but their mouths.</p><p>The present sizzle of the grill wakes Tobio back to the moment, his friends holding long chopsticks to flip tender strips of <em> harami, rōsu</em>, small cuts of <em> butabara. </em> Someone adds foil-wrapped buttered corn to the grill, someone else turns over a bouquet of shiitake mushrooms. The low table is a blur of yakisoba and bottles of mirin, black sauce in glazed ramekins, more red cuts of meat.</p><p>Yes, the week leading up to Hinata’s arrival that December was hectic. But Tobio never felt so warm—tucking his legs under the thick red Kotatsu, surrounded by everyone’s disbelieving responses to whatever outrageous story Hinata told from his time in Brazil. Across the table, Kindaichi whispered something that made a sake-flushed Akira burst into rare, loud laughter. For a moment Tobio was almost jealous, wishing he knew how to make him laugh like that. Wishing he had the right words.</p><p>Tobio could only watch and sit very still as the colour on Akira’s face brightened and dissolved and brightened again in response to whatever happened around them—Hinata telling a funny memory, Tsukishima making a mean joke, the perpetual glow on Yachi’s small face.</p><p>Now he sees Akira at the corner of the table. But this time he’s not laughing or eating from his shallow plate of meats—he stares straight at Tobio, unmoving, with the strangest frown on his face. But when Akira notices Tobio watching, his face transforms instantly. Akira relaxes into a smile, small and easy. Tobio smiles back. He watches Akira stand from his spot and slip into the kitchen.</p><p>Akira comes back to the table with another board of <em> harami </em> and <em> rōsu </em>to grill, this time coming to sit beside Tobio. The room had been so full of relief and laughter and light. But when his face draws this close, the room whittles down to only Akira. Always, like clockwork. Any room, any space. No image but his face, no sound but his voice.</p><p>Akira sits on crossed legs. The lines of him are always so elegant, even when flushed and soju-drunk. Even when his entire face scrunches up in disdain, in horror, in joy. He leans his head on Tobio’s shoulder and sighs softly, his warmth seeping through the sleeve of Tobio’s shirt. Tobio brings a slow hand to the top of his head, gently pushes his bangs away from his face. Starts combing through his hair with his fingers, nails lightly scratching the scalp. Akira makes a soft, pleased noise, eyelids fluttering closed. He’s so much like a cat, like the sleepy cats he’d found wandering the ruins of <em> Torre Argentina </em> in Rome.</p><p>Tobio turns his head to see Hinata staring, and Tobio’s too tipsy and full with meat to feel embarrassed. Then Hinata’s raising and lowering his eyebrows in suggestive succession, grin taking over half his face, and Tobio glares before looking away.</p><p>Yachi asks Tobio to talk more about Italy, and he does. He describes his teammates on <em> Ali Roma</em>, their techniques and looks and strange personalities. He’s nowhere near as good as Hinata at describing people, or building suspense, or setting up comedic timing, but everyone nods and exclaims and laughs at the right moments anyway. He lists places in Rome his teammates brought him to, names the teams in Europe they’d won and lost against. The grill’s long been turned off, the meats long devoured. Akira’s head stays perched like a bird atop his shoulder. Nobody says a word about it.</p><p>Tobio thinks Akira’s fallen asleep, probably, until a soft touch ghosts over the top of his knee. He glances down to catch the pale movement of Akira’s hand, now tracing along the blue hem of his jeans. Akira’s eyes keep shut, but Tobio notes the faint smirk on his face.</p><p>His friends continue listening with rapt attention, leaning forward half-drunk from their spots on the floor. Akira’s hand crawls slow under the table throughout, thumb brushing the insides of Tobio’s thighs through coarse denim. Tobio doesn’t know whether to stop him with a hand, or shove him off his shoulder. Or ask him to press deeper.</p><p>The hand climbs higher as he speaks, and Tobio bites his lip to keep from gasping when Akira lightly palms him through his jeans. Tobio finally pushes him off his shoulder, stirring him awake from his brief fake-sleep, and Akira laughs up at him like he’s the funniest thing in the world. Akira holds himself up from the floor and rubs at his eyes, grin crooked and devastating.</p><p>Tobio catches Tsukishima’s eye across the room, who raises a brow in their direction. He glares back weakly before turning away, putting all his attention again on Akira.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>There were too many beautiful places in Rome for Tobio to remember them all, and he’s always been terrible with names. No matter how pretty a face, no matter how pretty a location.</p><p>Still, he remembers bits and pieces of sun-drenched <em> Terrazza del Pincio. </em> From its fringes Tobio would lean over a white stone railing and get a clear view of <em> Piazza Del Popolo </em> below, the largest plaza in Rome. The city and everyone in it looked so small beyond the long railing. Distance can make people look so small.</p><p>From there, Tobio walked into gardens lined with jade-limbed stone pines, scattered marble statues. Some not completely intact. A foot crumbled away, a forearm missing. They all had such expressive faces—most of them sad, in some way. Some invisible grief carved into their features, some invisible longing curled around their arms, outstretched to hold something—or someone—unseeable.</p><p>Maybe they weren’t supposed to be sad. The teammate Tobio went with didn’t seem to think they were, shaking their head and laughing at Tobio’s observation. Maybe it was just Tobio.</p><p>Tobio found a small, green lake at the centre of the gardens, quiet and shaded beneath the arms of weeping willows. Empty too, except for a handful of ducks with emerald heads. Ducks, and a pair of Italian lovers circling the lake on a shallow wooden rowboat. A man in a straw hat stirring the paddles, a woman in bright red lipstick and a yellow floral sundress.</p><p>They didn’t spare a glance at Tobio, and he felt that they wouldn’t no matter how loud of a sound he made. He knew enough about what it’s like—sitting beside someone that whittled the rest of the world to a silent, static blankness.</p><p>Tobio sat down by the water’s muddy edge and let himself feel lonely at the sight of them. Just for a time. Just a little lonely.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio’s apartment empties slow throughout the rest of the night. The artifice of Tokyo springs up past the night’s dark blueness, an island of fallen stars stretching on forever below Tobio’s apartment. Nobody questions it when Akira’s last to leave—when he doesn’t really plan on leaving at all.</p><p>Tobio has a hundred memories of Akira in the pose he makes now, half his face in shadow as he looks far out the window. Akira, outlined by Tokyo. After so much time apart, being alone with Akira still feels so familiar.</p><p>But they’ve always been like that, haven’t they? Fitting back together, imperfect but still-touching, no matter how much time away. No matter how much time spent not thinking about the other person at all.</p><p>Akira goes to lean against Tobio on the couch, empty, tipped-over soju bottles and ribboned blue balloons strewn like jewels at their feet. Tobio rests his head on Akira’s shoulder. They don’t speak for a while. The Hitomi Tohyama record loops on and on behind them.</p><p>But a layer of fuzz swims under Tobio’s skin and his head’s been stockpiling desire since seeing Akira at the airport. Stockpiling desire—since those kisses in the blue room, since reconnecting in high school. Since he’d first met him at Kitagawa Daiichi, maybe.</p><p>Tobio shifts his head on Akira’s shoulder, looks up to meet his dark gaze. All of Tobio’s stockpiled desires lays bare in the space that bridges their two stares. Akira hums in response, expression unmoving, indecipherable. Tobio wishes, not for the first time, that he had had the keys to it.</p><p>Then Tobio breathes out a sigh, and he turns and leans forward to grip the front of Akira’s hoodie, wordlessly catching his mouth in a kiss. The kiss catches Akira off guard for a moment, but soon he’s sighing back, startled by the hunger in Tobio’s movements.</p><p>“Hey,” Akira tries to say and Tobio swallows the sound, Akira’s hands hovering like pale moths in the air behind him. Tobio pushes him against the couch, the front of his hoodie still in Tobio’s fist, mouth falling to trace the narrow line of Akira’s jaw.</p><p>“Someone’s impatient,” Akira laughs out, but it comes out too breathless to sound teasing. He buries a hand in Tobio’s hair, pulling by the roots to move him closer still. “How long’s it been since anyone’s touched you?”</p><p>“Too long.” There’s a short, breathless laugh against the skin of Akira’s neck. “Not since,” Tobio bites down near the carotid, and Akira lets out a harsh, startled breath. “You.” A gentle kiss to follow the bite. “The day I left.”</p><p>“Oh? That busy there?” Akira sounds so winded, but Tobio’s left him no time at all to compose himself. His eyes flutter shut as Tobio snakes a hand under his hoodie, ignoring the question. Akira sighs and Tobio’s missed this, all of this. His skin, his sighs. The look in Akira’s eyes when Tobio runs his hands down his sides, where he knows he’s most sensitive.</p><p>“Can you be sweet to me tonight?” Tobio murmurs into Akira’s ear. In response Akira only arches his head back, exposing the snow of his throat in a soundless <em> here, too, kiss me here, too. </em>Tobio’s lips drag down, obeying the motion.</p><p>“Be sweet to me tonight,” Tobio repeats, a little more insistent, a little more certain. There’s the warm press of a tongue against Akira’s skipping pulse, and a small, inelegant sound escapes through his teeth. “You can be mean to me in the morning,” Tobio adds, hardly a breath spared. Tobio’s nails scratch his sides lightly, and Akira shudders. “I’ll let you be mean.”</p><p>Akira laughs at him now, and the sound of it fills up every space in Tobio’s body. It’s been so long since he’s heard it. It used to be so much rarer. “And why would I do that?”</p><p>“Please,” is all Tobio says in response, and something in the way he says it makes Akira go still.</p><p>Akira takes a moment to catch his breath and compose himself, tilts his head to the side. “Okay,” Akira says, smiling now. He pulls his hoodie over his head, then does the same with Tobio’s shirt. “I’ll be sweet to you, Tobio.”</p><p>Tobio nods his nose into his neck, mouth falling open. Akira, a glass dream that Tobio can’t believe he gets to have, if only for a little while. Tobio speaks back to the dream in the language of his past year, only recently homed under the curl of his tongue.</p><p><em> ”Ti voglio,” </em> Tobio whispers into his skin. He hears the hitch in Akira’s breath above him, lips following the motion of his throat as he swallows. “ <em> Ti voglio, ti voglio da impazzire.” </em></p><p>Hand to his bare chest, Akira pushes Tobio down onto the couch leather, and Tobio falls under him, easy, obedient. Akira’s touch roams all the spaces he’s missed, barred from slipping into for nearly a year. Hands wandering down Tobio's sides, Akira leans in to kiss him.</p><p>Inside the wet red of Tobio’s mouth, Akira whispers, <em> I’ve waited so long </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                                                                         to do this again. </em>
</p><p>against his jaw, <em> I missed you. </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                        I want </em>
</p><p>                 <em> you. </em> </p><p> beneath his ear, <em> Tobio, </em></p><p><em>                                                                                                          Tobio</em>.</p><p><em> you’re so pretty. </em>    earlobe, <em> don’t turn away. </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                                                              pretty, </em>
</p><p>
  <em>                                           pretty </em>
</p><p>  shell of his ear, laughing <em> don’t </em></p><p>   <em> turn away </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                                                     from me, I mean it. </em>
</p><p>gentle hands pushing his bangs away, <em> don’t hide </em></p><p>
  <em>                                           your face. </em>
</p><p>  to his forehead, laughing, <em> don’t hide your face, </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                                                                          I want to see you. </em>
</p><p> <em> I want to see you, let </em></p><p> <em>                                                                                     me see you, I </em></p><p> brow, <em>love to look at you.</em> <em>                                   I missed</em></p><p>
  <em>                                       looking at you. </em>
</p><p> closed eyelid, <em> this is my favourite </em></p><p> <em>                                                                part of you. </em></p><p>lashes, <em>this is my favourite.</em>  nose, <em>my favourite</em></p><p> corner of mouth, <em> you’re </em></p><p>   <em> my favourite. </em></p><p>                       mouth, <em> you’re so pretty. </em></p><p>                                                                                                      chin, <em> Tobio, Tobio. </em></p><p>throat, <em>I missed you.</em> neck, <em>you have no</em></p><p>
  <em>                                                          idea. </em>
</p><p>  collarbone, <em> I thought I’d die from </em></p><p>   <em> missing you. </em></p><p>      shoulder, <em> I thought I’d. </em></p><p> chest, <em> from missing </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                                                                                you. </em>
</p><p>  neck, <em> please. </em></p><p> <em>                                                                                 please, Tobio. </em></p><p>   <em> Tobio, please, </em></p><p>
  <em>                                                                                                  Tobio, </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>                                                                                                          Tobio. </em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Some nights Tobio crossed <em> Ponte Sant'Angelo, </em> a bridge built from seven stone arches spanning the width of Tiber River. White statues of angels lined either side of the bridge, mounted atop the marble parapets. Ten angels exactly, all of them tall and looming. Tobio always felt witnessed by them, going from one side of the bridge to the other. As if their eyes were eyes and not just old stone.</p><p>At night the lanterns flickered on, long and yellow light stretched over the river. Sodium lamplight lit up the air, made the black river into a nest of fireflies. Sometimes he stopped in the middle just to look up at the angels, their marble wings, their long, wrinkled dresses. These angels looked sad, too.</p><p>They all held something in their hands. One held a crown of thorns. Another held a harp. A cross, a lance, a bundle of rope. In their stone hands the angels held markers of violence and tenderness. Violence and tenderness in equal measure.</p><p>Maybe a person could halve anything, cut anything clean down its centre, and have violence and tenderness fall away on either side of the knife. Marble angels, for example. All of Rome, for example. Each city to exist. Even the city Tobio holds quiet inside him, adjacent to the heart, with its curling roads and faulty street lamps that never light up, not even the dark.</p><p>A person exists at its centre—black eyed and elegant, standing in the same melancholy pose as Akira before Tobio turned on his heel, made his way slow through the departures aisle. Which side of the city does his image fall? Where will it tip when Tobio decides to slice its roads and gardens in half? Violence or tenderness?</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Tsukishima’s hosting the launch party for some new exhibit next weekend. He invited me during yakiniku<em>,</em>” Tobio tells Akira. He nudges his nose into Akira’s neck, trusting him to catch the implicit <em> do you want to come with me? </em></p><p>Akira smiles, then shoves Tobio’s weight off his shoulder. A wordless <em> okay, sure. </em> Tobio lies back down on the grass, smiling in the sky’s direction.</p><p>They’re sitting under the long shade of a black pine tree in <em> Kokyo Gaien</em>, having long finished the take-out curry Akira brought unprompted to his doorstep. <em> I’m on break, </em> he’d said before Tobio could ask. They have another half-hour to lie on the grass before Akira returns to work.</p><p>It’s rare for Tobio to see Akira in his work clothes. Realistically, Tobio knows it’s only slacks and a button down, sleeves rolled up to Akira’s elbows. But the way Akira looks in it, somehow, makes Tobio want to unclasp the steel watch circling his wrist and replace it with a better one.</p><p>“I can picture you in Italy,” Tobio says from his spot in the grass beside Akira, quiet. He shuts his eyes to the pale sky ahead of them, then fills in the empty blackness he finds. Fills it with Rome. With Akira. “I can picture you beside me there. Can see you standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. Or—your back, crossing the <em> Ponte Sant'Angelo </em> in front of me.” Akira in Rome, blending in easy with all those old angels. The image puts a dull ache in his chest.</p><p>When Tobio turns his head to look at Akira, he’s surprised to find him lying in the grass beside him, eyelids shut, too. Still unseeing, Akira says, “I heard the salted caramel gelato there’s very good.”</p><p>Tobio laughs, then, and laughs more when Akira’s shut-eyed face splits into a grin. He turns from Akira to face the sky again, closes his eyes in wistful imagining. “Yeah. I’ll buy you some, if you’re ever in Rome.”</p><p>Akira hums, but Tobio’s still thinking. He meant it as a joke, but the flyaway image puts down its wings, solidifies at the centre of Tobio’s mind. Tobio imagines Akira’s same face, same outfit as now, even—but it’s a completely different location, <em> Kokyo Gaien’s </em> endless green switched for a cobblestoned street in Trastevere. Instead of the park’s black pines, Tobio pictures vines of ivy crawling up the faces of rust-coloured apartments. He thinks of old balconies and yellow scooters and string lights at night. He imagines away the small sadness that seems to linger on Akira’s face.</p><p>This version of Akira licks at his cone. Tobio watches his eyes light up at his first taste of salted caramel gelato from Rome. He’d kiss off the gelato that catches at the corner of Akira’s mouth. He’d tuck away Akira’s rare open, delighted face, somewhere near his heart, maybe for forever. Akira in Trastevere peers up at him above his cone. He smiles, and it’s warmer than the smiles he’d just given Tobio in Japan. It’s Tobio’s imagination. Behind his eyelids he can make Akira look as in love with him as he pleases.</p><p>Akira in <em> Kokyo Gaien </em> shifts closer to Tobio in the grass, lifting a hand up to his mouth like he’s about to tell a secret. “I actually taught myself some Italian. For when you came back.”</p><p>“You learned?” Tobio turns to look at him, surprised. The admission wakes something up in his chest. “So we can talk in Italian?”</p><p>“Well. Does bedroom talk count as conversation?”</p><p>“Oh.” He turns his head away, face warm, but he catches Akira stifling a laugh at him from the corner of his eye.</p><p>“Yes. Now I can say things like,” Akira lowers his voice, shifts close enough to speak into Tobio’s ear, “<em> mi viene duro anche solo a pensarti.” </em></p><p>“<em>Kunimi.” </em></p><p>“I can also say, <em> adesso te lo succhio</em>. And <em> amo il tuo sapore. </em> And <em> voglio vederti tremare— </em>”</p><p>“Okay. Okay, Kunimi, I get it,” Tobio says, falling back to the grass with his eyes closed, face burning. Akira bends over the waist with a hand on his stomach, laughing merciless. And oh, even his laughter sounds so mean, just like the rest of him. So mean and so pretty.</p><p>“So.” There’s a playful glint in Akira’s eye. “Because I learned some Italian. I know what you said to me the other night.”</p><p>Tobio wonders if it’s possible to catch a fever from blushing too hard. “Is that so?”</p><p>“Yeah.” Akira’s grinning now, and oh, the pink curve of his mouth is so cruel. “I want you. That’s what you said. You said, I want you so much that I’m going crazy.”</p><p>“That,” Tobio stutters, blush deepening. “That was just said. In the heat of the moment. It doesn’t—“</p><p>“Mean anything, I know,” Akira cuts him off, quiet. His smile softens, too, becomes something almost—tender? He continues, “But I’m open to learning conversational stuff, too. I wouldn’t mind you teaching me.”</p><p>“Really?” The warm, fluttery feeling from earlier returns to erupt in Tobio’s chest. “Really? What do you want to know?”</p><p>“Hmm.” Akira’s eyes flash, sudden. “How do you say, <em> I’m kind of offended you didn’t get me any souvenirs from Rome, Kageyama?” </em></p><p>Kageyama sighs long and rubs at his nape, sheepish. “Oh, I’m sorry—“</p><p> “You can make it up to me.”</p><p>The suddenness of Akira’s voice knocks the half-apology out of his throat. “Oh?” Tobio shifts his gaze from the sky and back to Akira. By now he knows Akira enough to guess what might come next.</p><p>But then Akira says, eyes full of mirth, “Sing for me. In Italian.”</p><p>“What?” The flush at Tobio’s nape deepens.</p><p>“A song in Italian. Best souvenir ever.” Akira grins evil, but his hand moves tender when it outstretches to push Tobio’s bangs behind an ear. “Much more authentic than a colosseum keychain.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Please?”</p><p>“No, Kunimi—“</p><p>“Please, Tobio.” His voice falls gentle now, and Tobio’s words catch half-formed in his throat. Akira reaches out to take Tobio’s hand in his, thumbs running over the knuckles. He raises the hand to his mouth, plants a soft kiss to the back of it. His gaze lowers little. “Please.”</p><p>Tobio exhales a slow, deep breath. “I might know one.”</p><p>Akira lets out a triumphant laugh, expression shifting back instantly. “Quiet and close to my ear, okay.” There’s something sinister in Akira’s eye. “I don’t want people to look at us funny. Which I’m sure they would, if your singing voice is still like I remember from middle school.”</p><p>“Shut up.” Tobio refuses to blush more. Refuses. He takes a long breath.</p><p>This was an Andrea Bocelli song his host family put on while preparing dinner in the evenings. He’s heard it enough times from the mouth of his roommate, carelessly sung along to in that tiny, peach-tiled kitchen, for the lyrics to stick in his head. Tobio starts in the middle of the song, its vibrant chorus. It’s the part which rings clearest in his memory.</p><p>
  <em> Quando m’innamoro, io do tutto il bene a chi è innamorato di me. E non c’è nessuno che mi può cambiare, che mi può staccare da lei. Cuando me enamoro, doy toda mi vida a quién se enamora de mi. Y no existe nadie que pueda alejarme de lo que yo siento por ti. </em>
</p><p>Tobio sings out of tune and awful. But he watches the unguarded, happy expression on Akira’s face—more full of joy than he remembers seeing on him all week—and he’s too stunned to be embarrassed. Too entranced by the glitter in Akira’s dark eyes to think of anything else.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>In <em> Dolce Vita, </em> a film his roommate insisted Tobio watch with him one night, a woman with long, pale hair skips into the Trevi fountain. Dark evening dress and all. She twirled around in the water, raised her arms, bathed beneath the spray. Drenched and laughing, the sight of her so strange amongst all that cratered stone. She exclaimed, "Marcello, come here. Hurry up!" and a man in a dark suit drew toward her.</p><p>They wore such expensive clothes. All damp now, and for what? A grand declaration of love? A beautiful shot in a black-and-white film? A beautiful shot. How much ruination do humans let happen, anyway, for a single moment of beauty? A single moment of love. Expressed and then done with. So capricious and so brief.</p><p>When Tobio stopped by the Trevi Fountain the next day, he didn’t bother to make a wish on a coin. But he looked at the stone and the water Anita Ekberg danced into so many years ago, bordered by hellenistic sculptures overhead. Anita Ekberg, framed like the painting of a long-ago Roman goddess. Framed like a painting.</p><p>Akira wouldn’t do something as stupid as walk into the Trevi Fountain fully clothed. But sometimes Akira looks like a painting, all the world around him curled into a dim blue frame. Tobio could easily imagine him sitting at the fountain’s marble rim, coin held between two slender fingers. Has imagined him sitting there, sitting anywhere, a beautiful person thought into any beautiful place. This imagined Akira wears a terrible smile, illuminated to near translucency beneath Rome’s beating sun. Italy painting him technicolour.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio watches Akira smoke from his balcony’s curtained entrance. Akira leans forward, half-naked and lazy, smoke curling away from him. Forearms rest atop the pale railing, bare spine coiling vine-like in Tobio’s direction. Silhouetted against the cruel glow of Tokyo stretching out forever in front of him, Akira is so beautiful. Even his back is beautiful.</p><p>“Kageyama,” Akira says, not turning around. Tobio startles only a little before he walks up behind Akira. Bare arms wrap firm around Akira’s waist. He buries his nose in the crook of Akira’s neck, takes in the smell of salt and smoke and perfume with orange notes. Tobio’s eyes flutter closed.</p><p>Akira tilts his head toward Tobio’s in turn, the motion of it so small and familiar Tobio almost misses it. He probably would have, if Akira were anybody else. If Tobio were anybody else, someone who could stop themselves from cataloguing even the smallest of Akira’s movements.</p><p>“Kunimi,” Tobio says back, sinking his head further into the curve of his neck. He kisses the skin there, and his arms follow the ripple of Akira’s abdomen as he sighs. Tobio starts to trace absent shapes onto his bare stomach, the pad of his finger picking up on only the barest of trembles beneath it.</p><p>Tobio’s balcony is an alcove apart from the rest of the world, space enough for one person only. Tobio presses close against Akira’s warm back and it’s like he's trying to match him limb for limb, patch of skin to patch of skin. As if he were tricking the space into letting them both inhabit it, mistaking the two of them for one body only.</p><p>“I wish you were sweeter,” Tobio murmurs behind him.</p><p>“This again?” Akira tilts his head. “Aren’t I always sweet?” Akira smiles a little, raises his hand still holding his cigarette to outline his jawbone with a thumb. “Like this. I’m sweetest when I'm with you.”</p><p>Tobio exhales a short laugh. “No,” Tobio starts, sighing into Akira’s touch. His eyes start to water from the near smoke. “You know exactly how mean you are. You’re worse than Tsukishima.”</p><p>Tobio startles at the quickness with which Akira’s stance goes rigid. Akira laughs now, gaze narrowing. “Is that so.”</p><p>“Yes,” Tobio says, faint. He flutters his eyes closed for a second. Behind his eyelids he chases the soft of Akira thumb running down his face, the gentle rhythm of Akira’s breathing. “Especially like this. Especially when you’re with me.”</p><p>“Why’s that?” Akira’s voice matches Tobio’s near-whisper, as if they two of them are trying not to wake something precious in the dark. “Am I not speaking to you kindly, now? Don’t I touch you with sweetness?”</p><p>“You don’t mean it.”</p><p>Akira doesn’t respond.</p><p>Tobio sighs. He moves his face from Akira’s hand, leans away from him on the balcony. Is this a fight? Tobio doesn’t even know what he wants from Akira, really. An apology? Less sweetness? More sweetness?</p><p>“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Akira’s gaze is dark, questioning. “‘Be sweet to me,’ you said. You ask me to say these things.”</p><p>“Maybe, but—“</p><p>“It’s like when you tell me to pull your hair, or scratch you a little. I’m just going along with whatever gets you off.”</p><p>Tobio’s words stop and break apart in his throat. Ah, that’s right. Akira’s only here because Tobio’s invited him here. Akira’s only ever sweet because Tobio barters for his sweetness. It’s not Akira’s fault if Tobio wants to believe it.</p><p>Akira’s quiet as he smokes. Ash spirals down to Tokyo’s far-away glitter floor.</p><p>“Kageyama.” A pause. “What are we doing?”</p><p>“What?” Tobio falters a little against the balcony railing.</p><p>“I forget myself when I’m around you.” Akira’s voice goes quieter. “We shouldn’t do this anymore.”</p><p>There’s no hurry to his words, no anxious lilt. Akira’s looking straight ahead, eyes fixed to bright, bright Tokyo standing in protest to the hour’s endless dark. His eyes, like his voice, carefully hold nothing.</p><p>“You’re serious,” Tobio repeats, brows knitting. “Is this because I called you mean? I’m sorry—“</p><p>“No, it’s not just that.”</p><p>“Are you seeing someone? Going serious with someone else?”</p><p>“I’m not.” Smoke drifts away like an extension of Akira’s hand, like it’s his body’s only moving part. Akira is a perfect, slow-burning statue. “I wouldn’t.”</p><p><em> A fucking surprise. </em> “Then why?”</p><p>“This was convenient, before, wasn’t it?” Akira barely moves, nearly-finished cigarette still dangling between two long, pale fingers. “Before you went away.”</p><p>“Isn’t it still?”</p><p>“No. It’s not.” And Tobio wants badly to believe Akira doesn’t mean to be unkind, when he says, “Because I can’t touch you through a phone, Tobio. I can’t touch you through a screen.”</p><p>
  <em> But you’re touching me now. I’m touching you now. </em>
</p><p>Tobio says, “You don’t have to touch me all the time.”</p><p>“Don’t be silly.” Akira is far away. A planet spun out of orbit. “That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it?”</p><p>“I don’t understand.” Tobio hates the way he can’t hear anything in Akira’s voice, can’t see anything in the black ice of his gaze.</p><p>Akira smiles a little now, mouth sharp like a sickle. “We made a beautiful thing. Spun it from our skin.” He pauses to take a drag of his cigarette, narrowing his eyes at Tobio. He turns to blow the smoke beyond the balcony. “Now take the skin away. What do you think’s left?”</p><p>Akira is far, even as his body’s warmth pierces through the skin of Tobio’s palm like something sharp, something burning.</p><p>“I’m not going back until a month from now.” Hesitantly, Tobio brings his hands to Akira’s arms. He presses his cheek to the white curve of his shoulder again, breathes close to the skin. “Let’s just wait until then. Until a month from now.”</p><p>“Really, Kageyama?” There is nothing in Akira’s voice. Nothing in his gaze. “I know I’m good, but it’s not like I’m indispensable.”</p><p>“That’s not—“</p><p>“It is.” Akira’s voice is cold. “And I’m getting bored talking about this.” Then he’s moving away, discarding Tobio’s hands in the same elegant way he does his clothes. Up over his head and thrown careless to some nameless corner. Unbuttoned and unzipped and left to stay on the floor.</p><p>“What are you doing?” Tobio’s voice sounds unfamiliar even to himself, like he’s hearing himself from somewhere far away. Maybe somewhere far away from inside his own body.</p><p>“Going, obviously. It’s late.” Tobio watches from the balcony, completely still, while Akira draws away from him and back into the bedroom. Pale curtains billow between them.</p><p>“Yes, it’s late.” <em> But you always stay anyway. </em> Akira crouches to collect his clothes from the floor, half-translucent where the curtains cover him. T-shirt over side-swept hair. Dark jeans rolling up pale legs. “I can sleep on the couch.”</p><p>“I’ll take a taxi. You could pay for my fare, if that’ll ease your conscience.”</p><p>Akira’s expression hardly changes, but now a small furrow sits between his brows. It’s the first thing on his face all day that Tobio knows to recognize. Irritation, only scarcely held back.</p><p>Akira finds his navy coat hanging near the door and slips that on too. He turns to look at Tobio from the bedroom doorway, one final time.</p><p>“It’s been fun, Kageyama.”</p><p>Akira leaves without lingering to see if Tobio responds, to see if he moves at all from his spot on the balcony. Their quiet, quiet alcove. Their quiet, pitiful alcove.</p><p>Still, somehow, Tobio doesn’t feel entirely alone in the room. It’s as if Akira’s traded his presence for something colder. Something else.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p> </p>
<h2>
  <b>II</b>
</h2><p>
  <em> Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.</em>
</p><p> <em> — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities </em></p>
<p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Sometimes, after winning a game, Tobio’s team took him to one of the nightclubs located a stone’s throw away from Piazza Barberini. There’s one called <em> Notorious </em>that opened after 2 am, the site of afterparties after the afterparties. Its dance floor held so many bodies, exposed skin and silver jewelry reflecting a spray of neon.</p><p>The pulsing lights so closely mirrored the ones which washed over him in Shibuya, where Akira first held him, first kissed him. The tingling apparition of Akira’s lips released an ache that spread out from his chest and left his whole body burning. Tobio didn’t like this feeling. Especially not exhausted at the fringe of a nightclub full with too many unfamiliar faces, sweaty bodies. When it became too much he tried to dance it away, drunk off Italian whiskey and memory’s sweet poison.</p><p>So he danced. So he tried to dance with other people, tried to open himself to the touch of strangers, seen only through the veil cast by neon-shot fog machines. Tobio thought it’d make it easier, the facelessness of the people there—would make it easy enough to imagine the exact oil-black of an eye, slope of a nose, bird-like tilt of a head. As if a stranger’s touch could compensate for the miles of distance separating him and the one his skin dreams of. No one felt like him, tasted like him. Tobio started carrying around caramels to chew and imagine his mouth’s sweet salt. A mouth probably moving over someone else’s mouth, half a world away.</p><p>He’d never gone home with anyone he’d danced with. No matter how many masks cast by harsh light and shadow and smoke and vodka, nothing could compensate for the lost shape of hands, elegant like the white bones of a swan. Tobio’s memory of Rome unfolded as a series of blue rooms, each one only a pale imitation of the first—the only room he wanted to exist in.</p><p>A part of Tobio was stuck forever in that blue room. Stuck there forever, twenty-one, seeing Akira for the first time naked. Akira’s soft shadows, skin like lapis lazuli. The lines of him faint like veins over the air’s skin. Tobio, twenty-one, listening in as Akira unravels. Somewhere he still unravels, unspooling cobalt silk pulled by a blur of cobalt hands.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio meets with Tsukishima at an Izakaya in Roppongi, one of the fancy ones with light-up divider screens and polished wood on every surface, a potted fern for every table. Tsukishima’s already seated when Tobio arrives, two chalices of beer in front of him. He takes a sip from his chalice as Tobio sinks to his seat in front of him.</p><p>Tobio’s shared many of his growing pains with Tsukishima. None out of his own will. Still, Tobio will never fail to link Tsukishima to those three whimsical years of volleyball. Miyagi’s unforgiving sun and Hinata’s unforgettable laughter. Yachi’s enthusiasm, always so much larger than what should fit inside her tiny body. Yamaguchi’s sweet smiles and long hair and practiced jump float serves.</p><p>They’ve all become walking parts of Tobio’s history, Tsukishima no exception. Tsukishima and his biting sarcasm. His unkind nicknames. The steady, steady burn he kept sheathed under his skin.</p><p>Tsukishima studies Tobio for a moment. Then he asks, blunt, “Did you two break up?”</p><p>“What?” Tobio raises his head to look at him. A little too quick. He pulls his chalice of beer closer to himself. “We weren’t together.”</p><p>“Could’ve fooled me.” Tsukishima’s impassive face breaks into a smirk. He raises a hand to adjust his glasses, lenses framed with silver wire. “And I didn’t specify who, you know.”</p><p>Tobio stares. “We weren’t together.”</p><p>“Oh come on, Kageyama. You and Kunimi—hey, don’t give me that look—aren’t nearly as sneaky as you think you are.”</p><p>“I’m not lying.” Tobio leans forward on the table, spends some time tracing the glass rim of the chalice with an absent finger. He fixes his eyes to its wet amber, not yet drinking from it. “We’ve always been just friends.”</p><p>“Just friends who look at each other the way you two look at each other. Fuck. My bad.” Tsukishima takes a long sip of beer.</p><p>Because he’s speaking to Tsukishima, Tobio’s mind wanders back again to high school. Tobio knew hardly anything about the inner workings of his heart then, sixteen years old and singularly focused on the ball at his fingertips.</p><p>“He doesn’t want me, Tsukishima.”</p><p>But he knew his heart moved. He knew it used to stutter like a bird turned afraid whenever any pretty boy looked at him a certain way. Whenever Tsukishima looked at him a certain way—once.</p><p>Tsukishima says, without a pause, “But you want him.”</p><p>He’ll never be an expert on the workings of his heart. Still, Tobio’s not sixteen anymore. He’s learned enough to know it stutters like a bird afraid whenever Akira’s near. Whether he looks at him or not.</p><p>Tobio doesn’t respond.</p><p>“I’m sorry, Kageyama,” says Tsukishima, voice turned soft in a way it hardly ever softens. He runs his fingers up and down the smooth glass. “I don’t know what happened between you two. But whatever it is, he’s probably just afraid.”</p><p>“Afraid?” Tobio frowns. His chest weighs down with a leaden ache. “It’s just—me. It’s just me. Is he scared of me?” Tsukishima laughs a little at him, bringing his chalice to his lips again. Tobio deepens his frown.</p><p>“He’s not scared of you, Kageyama.” Tsukishima shakes his head once, a little absently. Almost to himself. “Aside from everyone you’ve ever gone against in volleyball, I don’t think anyone’s scared of you. Not after they get to know you, at least. You have a terrible resting face.”</p><p>“So you’re just never nice, then. Not even to sad people.”</p><p>“Someone has to be.”</p><p>Tobio glares, but there’s no heat in it. He leans his back against his seat, eyes flitting up to the ceiling. He admits, a little quieter, “I don’t understand him.”</p><p>Tsukishima looks at him for another moment. He says, “If anything, I always thought that you’ve seen more of the inside of his head than anyone else.”</p><p>Now it’s Tobio who laughs, a short, bitter sound. If only he knew an inch of what goes on inside Akira’s head. Tobio sinks back with a sigh into the leather seat. “He doesn’t let me see it. He doesn’t let anyone.”</p><p>“I know you don’t believe me. But I meant it.” Tsukishima shrugs. “And not just because you two were—you know. There’s always been some sort of gravity between you two.”</p><p>“A gravity?”</p><p>“Yes. At least, that’s always what I thought, whenever I saw you in a room together. Like two planets sharing an orbit. It was like—” Tsukishima pauses, thoughtful. “Like understanding each other came easy.”</p><p>“I didn’t think you paid me so much attention,” Tobio says, looking down at the drink in his hands. He wonders when Tsukishima first thought of this. While Tsukishima and Akira were in college? Before Tobio joined the national team? Maybe even high school—even with a net and so much more stretched between him and Akira. Tobio wonders if history has enough force to interrupt gravity.</p><p>“I guess it’s only natural, though. Since you’ve known him for so long,” says Tsukishima, before taking another sip of his beer.</p><p>“I’ve known lots of people for so long.”</p><p>“Then it’s more than just that.” Tsukishima gives a faint smile. Like he knows what Tobio’s thinking, maybe. Tobio looks at Tsukishima and lets their history unfurl—a delicate ladder caught between the two of them. Another short rung for each successful toss, for every laugh made at Tobio’s expense. For each exchanged, bitter bark and wrestle of boy-arms and sleepless study night. A rung for each moment of startling kindness. For the night Tsukishima had toppled asleep on the woven straw tatami mat in Tobio’s household, red pen tucked behind his ear, glasses—then unstylish and thick and rectangular—tilted askew over the bridge of his nose.</p><p>Maybe it was Tobio’s fault, for insisting Tsukishima stay a little longer, for saying <em> I still don’t understand this, if I fail tomorrow’s test I won’t get to come to the training camp, </em> every possible thing to say except for the word <em> please. </em> Outside the window everything was dark except for the moon, bright and full that night in November. Its light drifted pale over Tsukishima’s dreaming face. Tobio had leaned over him on the mat, red-marked vocabulary sheets long forgotten on the floor, and slid off his glasses gently. He’d folded and set them aside on the table. He’d stood up and padded away on socked feet, returned with a wool blanket to drape over his shoulders, shivering faint in his sleep.</p><p>
  <em> I’ve known you for so long, too. </em>
</p><p> “Maybe it’s some nameless energy,” Tsukishima says, offering a small shrug. He pauses a beat, holds Tobio’s gaze from where he stares across the table. “Something cosmic, maybe.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>A grand, turquoise fountain sits at the centre of <em> Piazza Navona</em>, protected by the watchful guard of many marble beasts. Different street performers spilled into the plaza during daytime—dancers, musicians, magicians, tightrope walkers. Portrait artists.</p><p>Once, Tobio paused by the tented vendors to watch the work of a portrait artist who only painted shades of blue. He watched them draw the face of a woman sitting on a wooden chair beside them, hands folded overtop a long skirt. Her lips and teeth and nose and eyelashes, all rendered in cobalt paint. Blue hair, blue skin, blue neck.</p><p>When Tobio looked at the finished result, he could no longer see a person. He saw, instead, bodies of water as if drawn on a map. A lake for an iris. Translucent wash of ocean over skin. Rivers for teeth, for lips, for the line that swims from the chin, up the jaw, over the curl of an ear.</p><p>Which is to say, all Tobio could see was Akira, staring back at him from the canvas. All blue lines and sad eyes. Exactly as he’d catalogued Akira in his head—too beautiful to be human, bodies of water in place of boy-hands.</p><p>Then Tobio turned his head toward the artist’s other blue portraits, pasted in a row to a thick, wooden board. A dozen blue faces stared back at Tobio. A multiplication of Akira, reflected back a dozen times. Each one signed at the corner with <em>Min</em> is inky cursive.</p><p>The artist caught Tobio staring at their paintings and waved their hand in attention, pale hands stained blue with oil paint. They asked him, <em>Stai aspettando in fila? Vuoi un dipinto? </em></p><p>
  <em> Do you want a portrait? </em>
</p><p>Tobio told them <em> yes. </em></p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio’s lingered near the museum’s entrance for half an hour now. He smooths down the front of his navy dress shirt for the second time in ten minutes, and down again the dark cotton of his slacks. He should wander around and take in the new exhibit, Tobio knows. At least indulge in some champagne, grab a fancy sandwich from the silver trays of passing caterers. He’s starting to annoy Tsukishima, he also knows, from the few times Tsukishima’s floated by telling him, <em> there are much better things to look at than the museum doors. Which aren’t actually part of the exhibit, just so you know. </em></p><p>Tobio doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s seen Akira. Days? A week? He figures it doesn’t matter, anyway, when it feels like forever no matter how much time apart. He’s alight with nerves at the thought of seeing him again—but he knows he has to, just once. Just a glimpse. He doesn’t even need to speak with him, or be seen by him in turn. Tobio runs a hand though the dark of his bangs, sighing.</p><p>Then—Tobio’s eyes follow the dark movement of Akira walking in, poised almost like he knows he’s some belated answer to a prayer. He's graceful, nearly floating in a black suit blazer buttoned once in the middle and nothing beneath, exposing a pale and shimmering chest. Akira looks like the doomed angels Tobio saw in Italian movies, all white glitter skin and wicked curve of a mouth. Lashes dark with mascara framing darker eyes, smooth line of neck curled tempting as a snake. Just his presence shapes the museum into a marble purgatory.</p><p>Akira’s outline turns sharper and more vivid with each step toward Tobio and it’s terrible. It’s terrible, how the vision of Akira at a party is only more whet for the Akira in Tobio’s brain, blade gone more lethal with every long glance. Lethal and more vibrant—until it’s impossible not to see Akira in everything, even in the dark. Especially in the dark. Tobio finds him there, always a lightless knife balanced atop his cheekbone. Always a letter of blue, blue blood.</p><p>Akira’s dark gaze flickers quick toward him. There’s a colourless line between them, long and taut as a wire. Tobio takes a breath. A beat. Akira looks away.</p><p>There’s a cough beside Tobio and he turns, jolted, to see Tsukishima beside him. Tsukishima wears a sideways smile, but his eyes are sharp when he says, “The fucking nerve of Kunimi. To waltz in and distract everyone from the exhibit I’m promoting.”</p><p>Tobio moves his eyes over the room and isn’t surprised at all that, yes, they’re not the only two looking. Akira lifts a finger below his nose, moves to look at some painting on the wall. He won’t look at anyone back, but surely he knows. Surely Akira knows more than anyone the effect he has on other people.</p><p>“Typical of him,” Tobio says finally, faintly. He downs the rest of his champagne and passes the empty glass to the tray of a passing caterer.</p><p>Tsukishima looks for only a moment longer. “Well,” Tsukishima says. “I need to greet some guests.” His gaze on Tobio softens a little, when he says, “I’m nearby if you need me. If you need to get away.” Tobio nods once, and Tsukishima drifts away.</p><p>Tobio turns then to see Hinata—barrelling toward him from the other side of the gallery with two amber flutes of champagne in hand, wild-haired and grinning like he knows how much of the earth he controls. Tobio’s heart is all affection and relief at the sight of him.</p><p>Then Hinata’s in front of him and pressing champagne into his hand without prompting, and all of him is beautiful. He’s always been beautiful. The whole world knows this much. It’s a relief, somehow, the reminder that there’s more beauty in the world than what glitters on the skin of Kunimi Akira.</p><p>“Yamayama, is something wrong?” Hinata’s warm voice startles Tobio out of his thoughts. “You look—“ He pauses, moving his gaze briefly off and on him again. Hinata rubs at his nape with a hand, sheepish. “You’ve looked kind of sad since you got here.”</p><p>“Huh?” Tobio blinks at him. “No. I’m fine.”</p><p>“Okay, don’t tell me.” He punches Tobio light on the arm, who glares in turn and punches light back. Tobio raises the flute of champagne to his mouth.</p><p>“It’s really nothing, Hinata.”</p><p>“Alright.” Hinata shrugs, pockets his hands in his dress pants. He leans back on his heels with a long hum. “Then I’ll just stand beside you in front of this painting and pretend you’re not moping over Kunimi Akira.”</p><p>Tobio makes a choked noise on his champagne that makes Hinata laugh, bell-loud and summer-bright. Hinata draws back with a fond, exasperated shake of his head.</p><p>“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, you know,” Hinata says with a boyish grin, running a hand through overgrown hair. Curled, orange strands fall just below his chin. “But you’re easy to read.”</p><p>Tobio says nothing, pretending to think hard about the framed Edo-era painting of Date Masamune on the wall in front of them.</p><p>Then Hinata says, quiet, “I’m sorry.”</p><p>Tobio turns from the painting to face him, eyes wide. “For what?”</p><p>“I feel a little responsible.” He reaches a hand toward Tobio’s arm. His eyes are wide, earnest with old guilt. “For encouraging you, at the start. But Yama, I really did think he felt the same as—“</p><p>Hinata cuts himself off abruptly, raised hand drawing away. He’s staring wide-eyed at something past Tobio’s shoulder, and Tobio’s about to ask or turn around before—a familiar touch of skin, cool and featherlight, brushes the back of his neck.</p><p>“Tobio.” It’s Akira's voice, low and sudden.</p><p>Tobio goes still. Akira stands close behind him and stays there, fingers running light from Tobio’s nape to the front of his throat, from his throat down to the sharp of his collarbones. Hinata’s eyes follow the motion. Tobio knows Akira knows this. Still, Akira doesn’t look up at Hinata, just bends his head to kiss Tobio light on the jaw. Cool lips move over the skin, soft in the shape of, “I was looking for you.”</p><p>“Kunimi?” Tobio’s frozen, helpless at Akira’s sudden nearness. He senses the smooth motion of Akira’s wide grin, pressed still against the skin of his neck. Akira lets his hand fall to swipe the flute of champagne from Tobio’s loose grip, bringing it to his own lips. His other palm presses against Tobio’s chest.</p><p>When was the last time Akira touched him? It must have been—that night on the balcony. The shape of him shrinking distant behind a white fog of curtains. He’s not shrinking distant anymore. Pressed against Tobio’s back, Akira rests a chin on his shoulder, side-swept hair tickling his neck and his cheek. He’s too close.</p><p>“Kunimi!” It’s Hinata this time, voice bewildered.</p><p>“Hinata.” Akira finally looks up at Hinata from behind Tobio’s shoulder, a strange grin emerging too-quick on his face. “Did I interrupt something?”</p><p>“No, not at all.” Hinata shakes his head quickly, face reflecting a multiple-watt version of the smile on Akira’s own. “Did you just get here? This new exhibit’s pretty cool, isn’t?”</p><p>“It’s okay,” Akira murmurs, nodding his head further into the crook of Tobio’s neck. His breath fans too-hot over Tobio’s skin and Tobio tries to keep his own breathing even, still pinned in place by Akira’s touch. Why did the hand splayed on his chest, pressure warm through the thin layer of Tobio’s dress shirt, feel perilous as a knife poised just near his throat? Only then does Tobio realize—Akira’s hand shakes, just slightly. “Hmm. Tsukishima could’ve picked better catering food.”</p><p>“Excuse us, Hinata,” Tobio blurts out, feeling shocked awake. Before Hinata could respond he’s already turning the other way, prying Akira’s hand off his chest by the wrist. He takes the champagne from Akira and pushes the glass back into Hinata’s hand. Tobio doesn’t let go of Akira’s wrist, tugging him away from their spot in front of the painting. Hinata’s left standing with his mouth half-parted, two amber flutes of champagne in his hands.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>They slip their way into a quieter, dimmer room in the museum. There is only one display here, an inked yellowed scroll at the centre of the room, parchment curled in on itself like the head of a browning rose. A ceiling projector displays the contents of the scroll onto an opposite wall, typed out in dark, simple kanji over a blue square of light. It’s the only source of light in the room. The inside of the glass case, and the wall projection too, sit like souvenirs ripped clean from another world’s heart. Somewhere further back in space, further back in time.</p><p>Someone named <em> Ai</em>. In Italy their name might be <em> amore mio, tesoro mio</em>. I miss you enough to lose my whole mind, reads the text projected blue onto the wall. No thought in me, no blood in me. I am nothing now, nothing now, only skin and skull and missing you.</p><p>Tobio steadies Akira by the shoulders in front of him, grip digging into the black cotton of his blazer. He takes a moment to examine his face up close. Stray blue from the projector reflects off the oil-dark of Akira’s dilated eyes.</p><p>“What did you take?” Tobio asks, curt, eyes steel-fixed on his face. His grip stays wrapped around Akira’s slender wrist.</p><p>Akira grins again, too-quick and too-wide. “You’re interested now?”</p><p>“Kunimi.”</p><p>“Why does it matter, Tobio?” Akira takes a step back, finally pulling his wrist from Tobio’s hand. Fast and urgent, as if Tobio’s touch scalded. “Why don’t you go talk to someone less mean. Hinata’s so nice, isn’t he?”</p><p>“Kunimi,” Tobio repeats, voice edging on frustration. “Please answer me.”</p><p>“Nicer to be around than me, I’m sure,” Akira continues, face twisting with a sniff. The air between their mouths tastes thick as glass. Oxygen switched for windowpane, shattered small and sharp in his lungs. “Or Tsukishima. Since he’s nicer than me too, apparently.”</p><p>“You should have just told me,” Tobio starts, voice lowering—though he wanted nothing more, in that moment, than to scream. “If what I said bothered you that much.”</p><p>“You’re cute,” Akira replies with a derisive laugh, hopping another step backward. “When you pretend to care about me.”</p><p>“I do care about you,” Tobio snaps, sharper now. Something tight and painful digs into his chest. “How could you say that?”</p><p>Akira looks away. Tobio steps forward to close the distance Akira’s made. He takes hold of his wrist again, draws it toward himself. A silent plea. A silent <em> look at me, look at me please. </em></p><p>“Why did you?” Tobio asks, drawing closer. He keeps his voice soft, but his grip on Akira’s wrist tightens.</p><p>“Boredom, obviously,” Akira says, plain and lacking in cadence.</p><p>“Boredom,” Tobio repeats, disbelieving.</p><p>“Did you want some?”</p><p>“And at Tsukishima’s event, around everyone,“ Tobio starts, ignoring his question. “The way you acted around <em> Hinata </em>—“</p><p>Akira flinches, and Tobio stops. He takes another step toward Akira, close enough now to make out the difference of darkness in Akira’s blown-out pupils, threads of pink around them. Close enough to mark the faint quickness of his breathing.</p><p>Tobio studies him another beat. “Were you jealous?”</p><p>“You’re funny.”</p><p>“Why were you jealous?” Akira turns his head away, and Tobio goes quiet again. Their faces stir an inch apart, but Akira has the talent to stretch any inch to the length of a mile, a year. Tobio wants nothing more than to close that distance—and so he touches his forehead against Akira’s own. One year, one mile, one inch whittles to zero.</p><p>“Akira.” Tobio flutters his eyes closed, lashes brushing soft along the skin of Akira’s forehead. His thumb rubs slow circles against the inside of Akira’s wrist. Voice careful, he tries, ”Do you want me?”</p><p>Akira scoffs, but a pink flush blooms from the centre of his face. “Don’t be ridiculous—“</p><p>“You want me,” Tobio says, and he’s certain now, more sure. He’ll fall apart if he isn’t. “And you know I want you. So why?”</p><p>“Tobio,” Akira says, and his responding voice disarms Tobio with its changed softness. He doesn’t draw his forehead away. “I told you already. There’s no point to this.”</p><p>“<em>Ti voglio.</em>” Tobio’s close enough to hear Akira’s stuttered breath. He squeezes Akira’s shivering hand and lifts it in the slim space between them, brings it to his lips. Tobio plants a kiss to unsteady knuckles, ignoring the shudder which starts to crawl unsteady down his own spine. “<em>Ti voglio da impazzire. </em> You know what I’m saying, right?”</p><p>When Akira doesn’t respond, Tobio brings his hand to his lips again, tries again. “<em>Ti voglio,” </em>he repeats soft into the back of Akira’s hand, and he doesn’t let the flash in Akira’s eye escape his notice. He’s no longer sure what he’s asking for, or if they’re thinking of the same thing. What does he want, anyway? What could he want so badly from Akira? Attention? Sex?</p><p>Him. Just all of him.</p><p>“Akira,” he repeats, finally grasping at something solid in his brain. “I’m not mad at you. Let’s get out of here.”</p><p>Akira actually laughs a little, then, and the sound of it puts so much weight on Tobio’s chest.</p><p>Tobio takes another breath. “Akira,” he says again. He keeps Akira’s eye, forces himself to ignore the overwhelming, nameless relief that comes with being seen by him again. “In a minute I’m walking out the door over there.” He nods once past the dim room, toward the glass double-door exit.</p><p>“And?” Akira smiles again, but now it hides none of his sadness. “You expect me to follow?”</p><p>“Yes,” Tobio says, and he likes to think he surprises Akira, just a little, with his surety. His voice drops to almost a whisper. “If you want me at all.” <em> Even if only a part of me. </em> “Then come with me.”</p><p>Akira’s expression doesn’t change, impassive as ever. Gaze dark and unreadable as ever.</p><p>“If you don’t,” Tobio takes a breath. “I won’t ask anymore.” He presses a final kiss to Akira’s cool, shaking fingers—and lets go. He steps backward, turns around. Draws away. Akira behind him, Tobio makes his way out of the room.</p><p>And then—fingers flutter over his own, quick like a kiss of butterflies. Tobio turns his head around, follows the line which connects the hand to an arm, to a shoulder. Tobio meets the movements of his hand, curls his fingers through Akira’s own.</p><p>“Hold tighter,” Akira tells him, and he’s so quiet. As if they weren’t the only ones there in that room—the only ones to exist for miles. Sole two in the city. Sole two in the world. “I’ll float away if you don’t.”</p><p>Tobio obeys without a word, intertwining their fingers so that each inch of his palm meets corresponding skin. He squeezes once, twice. Akira smiles again, but it’s small now, almost timid.</p><p>Akira asks, “Where are you taking me?”</p><p>“Anywhere.” Tobio’s heart beats furious in his chest. Somewhere blue.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>There’s a famous keyhole in Rome—the <em> Aventine Keyhole, </em> his friend called it, attached to a door in the <em> Priorato dei Cavalieri di Malta. </em> Tobio crouches down to peer through the hole, head pressed cool against the door’s ancient brass. For a moment, a brass keyhole poses as a telescope, seeing glass aimed just south of the priory. Powder blue sky above, parallel rows of manicured hedges and stone pines below. St. Peter’s dome floats perfect at the centre, looking as if it were held, maybe, by all that shadowed green.</p><p>There are so many ways to look at a place. Things look different from above than they do from below. A thousand different angles from which to view a tree. A tree split down its spine, multiplied a thousand-fold. That many more homes for black-winged starlings, finding somewhere to rest after swooping through air for hours.</p><p>One way to look at a place: through the tiny, brass-framed window of a keyhole, so much smaller than a place up close. Even St. Peter’s dome, curved ceiling high enough to house a floating angel, can and does exist in such small forms. Picture-perfect, key-hole shaped.</p><p>So many ways a place can change. Maybe it’s a little tragic. Maybe that’s the fun of it—that a place will never stay stagnant, shifting in the light with every step a boy can take backward, forward, backward, backward, backward.</p><p>Isn’t that comforting? A first meeting place between two people will always split itself multiple. Even when they no longer speak, kept apart by distance and apathy and time, the place will carry their imprint. A thousand different ways to look at their ghosts, meeting inside St. Peter’s dome again and again and again.</p><p>But Akira’s never been to St. Peter’s dome, and appears like a ghost all the same. Maybe it’s enough to be in someone’s thoughts—someone looking through a keyhole with a view to an ivory dome, blue sky ahead, stone pines below. Maybe that’s the only prerequisite for haunting: to sprout as an idea from another person’s head.</p><p>Tobio crouches down to peer into the keyhole, forehead pressed cool against the door’s ancient brass. He sees St. Peter’s imposing shape, then Akira superimposed over it. Pale enough to be translucent. Shaped so much like a haunting. He looks back at Tobio.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>In his first year of Kitagawa Daiichi, back before anything bad ever happened, Tobio took Akira’s hand, just like this, and beckoned him to follow. </p><p>Tobio hadn’t yet a name for the feeling that took over his chest whenever he looked at Akira. But then, in the spring, he’d stumbled upon a clearing in the park full of cherry blossom trees in full bloom, a pale pink hail of petals spinning to the ground. He later told Akira, <em> I want to show you something. </em></p><p>Akira looked at him, reluctant, centre-parted bangs falling over his eyes. But when Tobio reached for his hand, Akira didn’t pull away. He doesn’t remember the entry point, the direction of road or sidewalk they’d run across, but Tobio remembers the warmth of Akira’s palm in his hand. The world whittled to nothing but that brief instance of touch.</p><p>Then Akira lifted his head, and a flurry of cherry rained onto his face, and he forgot, for a moment, to keep his face blank. Akira didn’t smile, back then. But Tobio caught a slight blush beginning to spread on his nape, caught the glimmer in his eye. And that was more than enough.</p><p>Tobio opened his mouth, reckless boy-heart at its centre. If he’d kept it open he would’ve said: When I look at this. When I look at you. The feeling is the same. </p><p>Tobio closed his mouth. </p><p>It’s almost like that. That soft, warm morning. That high, pale sky shot through with pink. But now the sky spins black and the hand in Tobio’s is larger now, his own hand larger too. Tobio has only a half-formed thought of where to take Akira. He feels, all at once, ten years old and graceless with no name for the feeling Akira puts inside his chest. </p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>They follow a tree-lined path leading to an empty pond, a stone garden circling its shoreline. The full moon reflects off its dark water. Then, without a warning, Akira starts to strip. </p><p>“Akira,” Tobio says, feet stuck to the stone shore. He can only watch as Akira pulls off his suit blazer, dark cotton sleeves sliding down his pale arms. He isn’t wearing anything under it. “Akira,” he repeats, a little breathless, “What are you doing?”</p><p>“Going for a swim,” Akira answers, the ghost of a smile flickering over his lips. Shirtless now, graceful hands move to the zipper of his jeans. Tobio swallows as he pulls them down and kicks them to the side, haphazard beside his discarded blazer. Each motion is slow and deliberate. Tobio’s breath catches when Akira’s fingers hook to the waistband of his boxer briefs. </p><p>And Tobio wants—wants only to touch him. He wants to touch him the way the moon gets to touch him. It’s almost unfair, the pale light moving over his body’s crescent. How the water gets to caress his ankles, up his calves and knees, and then higher, more of him. The way Akira lets it. It’s almost unfair. </p><p>The corner of Akira’s mouth twitches, like he knows Tobio’s staring. He always knows.</p><p> “Oh, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.” Akira smirks while saying it. He stands naked over the stone garden, doused head to toe in moonlight. Before Tobio could decipher the flash in his eye, Akira’s already turning around. </p><p>Akira steps into the pond, feet steadfast and sure. Familiar, like a boy coming home. Like water returning to itself. The moon presses to the curl of Akira’s back. </p><p>Tobio watches Akira glide through the dark. This is not the first time he’s seen him in water.</p><p>He’d seen him swim during physical education, body elegant as it cut through Kitagawa Daiichi’s outdoor pool. No matter how yellow the sunlight looked on everything else, on Akira it glittered pearl-like. Shine a light, any light, onto Kunimi Akira and he’d turn to instant moonstone. He was all moonstone then, impossible beneath the midday August sun. He is all moonstone now.</p><p>All the girls in his class seemed to think the same thing. All the girls, staring at him and whispering to each other, pink faces behind hands, pretty in their swimsuits and goggles and high ponytails.</p><p>Tobio and Akira laughed at how different Kindaichi looked in water, wet hair hanging limp along his forehead, around his ears. <em> You don’t look so tall anymore</em>, Akira teased, and he wasn’t smiling, not quite, but it was the closest thing to it that Tobio remembers seeing during those navy-skyed middle school days.</p><p>It was the first time Tobio saw Akira under a yellow sun. All moonstone with no moon to show for it. Tobio never saw him look like that again. Not even when he saw him everyday for the rest of that perfect summer. It’s never the same sun, just entering Leo, that perfect midday hour.  Akira shifts in the light. He moves and all his shadows move with him. </p><p>At the centre of the pond’s inky blue spell, Akira points at Tobio, curls the finger towards himself. <em> Come here, come here.  </em></p><p>Tobio strips naked before cutting across the water toward him. Then Tobio is right in front of him and Akira’s finger is still pointed toward him, still curled, the knuckle knocking light against Tobio’s bare chest. The contact is small and cold.</p><p>Then Akira’s hands fly to his shoulders and push him underwater, and Tobio’s gasps for breath before his face breaks the surface, and Akira meets him underwater. Akira’s hands are still on his shoulders when he leans forward to kiss Tobio close-mouthed, brief and barely there. Underwater, Tobio cannot tell how much of the tingle on his lips is salt, Akira, dream. Nothing else exists when he’s near, anyway. All the water in the world becomes Akira. All the dreams in the world become Akira. </p><p>Then Akira pulls him above water and laughs at him, a glistening blur of lunar skin and dark hair and wet, red mouth. Tobio doesn’t know how long he stays like that, just staring at him as he laughs, before Akira breaks reaches toward Tobio with a hand. Tobio closes his eyes.</p><p>Then there’s a gentle brush of skin against Tobio’s forehead, cool as they push back his damp bangs, bringing it behind his ear like a curtain from a window. Akira’s breath fans over his face in a warm, sweet cloud. Tobio opens his eyes to Akira, who is so close, who is looking at him with enough plain affection to knock Tobio off-balance. And his foot slips on the muddy floor of the pond and he’s toppling toward Akira, who’s catching him in turn, and they’re both sinking again, young and clumsy and laughing and touching.</p><p>Tobio never wants Akira the same. He will always want him different—different from middle school, from Shibuya, from the parties, from his apartment. Tobio will want Akira different tomorrow. Will want him different in a decade, many decades, when their skin stretches thin and their eyes go terrible. He wants Akira in his bed, years from now. In his bed, next month, next week. Tomorrow. Tonight. </p><p>“Think you’d recognize me?” Akira’s voice comes out hushed. He cuts through the water to draw closer to Tobio. “In another life. Think you would?”</p><p>Tobio looks at him now, doused in lake and moonlight. If he always looked like this under moonlight, then yes. He’d recognize the blue shape of him in water anywhere. He’d recognize the moon bouncing off his skin anywhere he went. </p><p>Akira leans in to whisper, very softly, into Tobio’s ear. He whispers in the language of Tobio’s past year, only recently homed under the curl of his tongue. </p><p>
  <em> ”Ti voglio.” </em>
</p><p>I want you.</p><p>
  <em> ”Ti voglio da impazzire.”</em>
</p><p>I've lost my whole mind wanting you.</p><p>Each version of Akira is already an apparition. Even the one whose skin connects with his solidly now, whose lips brush soft against him. Tobio kisses Akira back, knowing he will never see him again. Not like this. Not this exact, deep shade of blue under the moon, passing slow through Libra now. And so Tobio stares at Akira like he’s committing him to memory. Tobio touches Akira like he’s already lost him. </p><p>Then Akira whispers in his ear, <em> Tobio, Tobio, Tobio, </em> as delicate hands smooth down the broad planes of his chest, his shoulders, the inside of his arms. Tobio stands still in the water as fingertips dance down the long line of his spine. His own hands clutch tight around Akira’s hips, pulling them against his. He drinks in the soft sound Akira lets spill at the touch.</p><p>Akira keeps one hand running down Tobio’s spine, while his other falls away, shoulder to chest to abdomen, then lower to wrap around them both under the rippling water. Tobio wants to freeze the moon stuck to Akira’s skin, the dark of the water, the salt of the air. He wants Akira’s voice repeating his name on loop in his ear forever.</p><p>Without any warning, Akira starts to cry.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p>

<h1>
  <b>III</b>
</h1><p>
  <em>Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.</em>
</p><p> <em> — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities </em></p><p> </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio’s never believed in God. But there’s something about the basilicas in Rome, grand, tall things with insides full of gold and ivory, that made Tobio dream.</p><p>There’s a dead Italian artist, Amedeo Modigliani, who painted portraits of women but left their eyes blank, pupil-less, unseeing. He used to say <em> quando conoscerò la tua anima, dipingerò i tuoi occhi. </em> When I get to know your soul, I will paint your eyes.</p><p>Italians value the gaze as a conduit for intimacy. Modigliani understood this, and painted a hundred void eyes like a testament to his own defences. But he painted pupils onto the eyes of one woman, the only human being he’d ever fully understood. Madly in love until the day he died. Jeanne Heuburterne rendered a hundred times in warm colours and black hats and lilac dresses. Hands clasped at her lap, elbow pressed to an armrest, touching her own wrist, touching her own face. Curled red hair and soulful blue eyes, painted delicate onto the whites of every single painting. She was the only woman who got to keep her eyes. She was the only one.</p><p>Tobio once walked into the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, struck at once by its fully gold altar, its blue-painted ceiling, its marble arches. Marble everything. Michelangelo sculpted a statue of Jesus for this basilica, and so Jesus stands perpetually there holding his own cross, his own prisoner’s rope. And so he stands, perpetually unseeing. His eyes were blank. So were the eyes of all the sculptures here, and every other angel and saint and Madonna in Rome.</p><p>And oh, Tobio’s never believed in God. But something about Rome’s endless succession of unseeing eyes nudged him into a pew, had him falling to his knees. He closed his eyes and saw—him, even in the dark. Even half a world away he is there, spinning perpetual at the blue centre of Tobio’s eye.</p><p>Tobio didn’t ask for much. He prided himself on using his own two hands to take everything he wanted, and if his hands couldn't take, they'd build. In front of an altar made of gold, Tobio lifted his taker hands, his builder hands, and clasped them together. Tobio prayed only for someone to see him back.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>A pale boy shakes inside Tobio’s arms, cool face pressed to the side of his neck. Tobio holds Akira close as he cries. He brushes away his wet bangs, kisses the hands curled in fists over his chest. Akira uncoils, coils, uncoils against him, body a lucent vine piercing the water’s opaque dark.</p><p>In his arms Akira is ten years old and crying over a scraped knee, skin split open on the pavement, his redness so stark. Tobio waits for sensei to come back with bandages and wipes, Akira’s tears wetting the thin cotton of his shirt. He waits, frame shaking with Akira’s silent sobs. So soundless and so violent. In his arms Akira is twenty-three and crying, tears sliding down Tobio’s back in salt rivulets.</p><p>Akira cries without making a sound. Another thing unchanged between then and right now. How much more is he holding back? Tobio doesn’t ask. His mouth is too busy for words, moving soft over the skin of Akira’s forehead. Tobio waits for Akira to speak.</p><p>He will wait, and keep waiting if Akira one day rises from bed and decides to leave home for some faraway place. Even if two worlds away. Even if two worlds away and farther still inside himself. Tobio will linger at the shoreline with open arms, ready to catch Akira by the shoulders when he finally walks backward from whichever dark cove his body’s retreated. He’ll catch the soft sound curling late from his mouth. He’ll catch him guileless and afraid and wearing only half his shape. It isn’t the first time Tobio’s waited. It isn’t nearly the first time he’s waited for Akira.</p><p>Silent, Tobio runs light fingers up and down the delicate knobs of his spine. Out of all of Tobio’s languages, new and old, he’s always been most fluent with his hands.</p><p>Then Akira murmurs into his neck, quiet enough for Tobio to only barely catch it. “I’ve been awake for so long.” Akira’s lips against his skin are soft and wet. “I’ve been awake for so, so long.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Inside the Basillica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Tobio looks up at the famous rose window, a perfect circle framed by marble angels and gold. The Madonna sits at its centre with a naked baby held still on her lap. She is all dark, precise lines and blue stained glass. How beautiful it must be, to be a thing comprised of only blue stained glass. This Madonna is translucent. Looking up at her is the same as looking at the sky.</p><p>Tobio looks up at the cobalt light swimming through the Madonna’s stained glass body and thinks, not of saints, but of someone he loves. Someone beautiful enough to be made of stained glass. Beautiful enough to be mistaken for the sky or a tide or a blue caldera. And oh, Tobio’s never believed in God. But the light comes down like a lapis-robed angel, Akira’s name held in its hands like a miracle.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>When Tobio wakes the next morning, his first thought is, <em> oh, it’s so warm. </em></p><p>Akira is so warm, pressed against Tobio’s bare chest, filling soft the circle of his arms. He looks so peaceful in his sleep—sweet and untouched by the world. This, too, is a version of Akira that Tobio’s never seen before.</p><p>Tobio’s mind flickers through the faces he’d seen just yesterday. Akira in glitter makeup at the entrance of the museum. Akira in water, under the full moon, the lines of him pale and graceful enough to blend with so much lunar light. Naked and blue, leaning close to whisper <em> ti voglio </em> in Tobio’s ear, <em> ti voglio da impazzire. </em></p><p>Tobio knows he can’t see those faces again. He knew it while watching them move in real-time—to see Akira is the same as losing Akira. He’d watched him already missing his face. It’s as if, in his time in Italy, his body swallowed the feeling of missing Akira and forgot how to be without it. Maybe it’s become the default state of Tobio’s body. His primary instinct: missing him, even when Akira’s right in front of him, beautiful and naked beneath white hotel sheets. Especially when he’s right in front of him.</p><p>Then Akira stirs in his arms, and all thoughts sweep away from Tobio’s brain. Tobio was lucky enough to witness him asleep. Now he’s lucky enough to witness him waking. Awake.</p><p>Dark eyes flutter open, and the gaze in them is soft. “Tobio,” Akira says, raising a fist to rub at his eye. His voice is low with the remnants of sleep. ”Is this a dream? Am I dreaming?”</p><p>“Akira,” Tobio murmurs back. <em> Good morning to you, too. </em> Maybe he’s still just dreaming up the weight of Akira in his arms, as he had so many nights past in Italy. Maybe the warmth of him is temporary. Maybe the sight of him will dissipate with the rest of the sun spilling onto the bed, spilling onto Akira—golden hands cupping his face, his neck, his shoulders. Maybe the sunlight’s eating him away. “I don’t know. Maybe.”</p><p>“Well. If it is, I’ll wake up later.” Akira buries his head further in Tobio’s chest, sighing, and the breath pierces through him. “Please wake me up later.”</p><p>“Can you be truthful with me?” Tobio asks, suddenly.</p><p>Akira hums and tilts his head to the side, a question in the sound, in the movement. His head draws back from Tobio’s chest a little look at him better, and Tobio instantly wishes he hadn’t.</p><p>“Hmm,” Akira says, thoughtful. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”</p><p>“Please,” Tobio adds, heart going, going, going in his chest. He wills himself not to pull Akira closer. “Tell me something true.”</p><p>His eyes flash in muted understanding, and Tobio breathes out a small sigh. Akira is quiet for a moment. Then he murmurs, barely audible, “Don’t need alarms.”</p><p>“Hmm?” Tobio tilts his head closer.</p><p>“When you left,” Akira starts to murmur, gaze half-lidded and dark. “I lost all sense of time, for a minute. Had to start setting up phone alarms again. Didn’t really need them to wake up, before. I’m only saying this because I’m dreaming, by the way.”</p><p>“Really? I thought you needed them a lot, actually.”</p><p>“Shut up.” Akira shoves on his arm, but he’s smiling. “As I was saying. All I needed to know it’s seven a.m. was your morning breath ghosting over my mouth.”</p><p>Akira leans in to press his mouth against Tobio’s. Just as Tobio tries to deepen the kiss, Akira leans his head back again.</p><p>“I’m not just touching you.” Akira moves a thumb to Tobio’s bottom lip, brushes over it once. Tobio opens his mouth to trap the thumb between his teeth, but Akira moves his hand away, laughing. “I’m waking up. I’m measuring time.”</p><p>“Measuring time?” Tobio murmurs back, mind still hazy with sleep. Akira shifts to move behind him on the bed.</p><p>“And your hand going down my back, like this.” Akira’s hand flutters down the back of Tobio’s neck. “Seven ten.” Soft fingers press each bare knob down his spine, causing Tobio to shiver.</p><p>Akira pauses where the curve of Tobio’s back dips inward, head leaning forward. A long kiss presses to the small of Tobio’s back. Into his skin, Akira says, “You kiss me here. It’s seven twelve.”</p><p>His mouth travels up from the small of his back. A trail of kisses stretching upward, each one lingering longer than the last. “Seven fifteen. Seven sixteen,” Akira murmurs soft into the muscles on his back, and Tobio’s breath starts to come a little quicker.</p><p>“Seven eighteen,” Akira whispers into his nape, and Tobio shudders. Akira’s mouth paints a half-circle around his neck, then presses to the base of Tobio’s throat. “Seven nineteen.”</p><p>“Akira,” Tobio starts to say, then swallows when Akira puts a palm to his chest, pushing down until Tobio’s lying flat on his back against the pillows. Akira’s lips follow the motion of his Adam’s apple, then kiss down in a line again. Down Tobio’s neck, collarbone, sternum. Over a nipple. Over the plane of Tobio’s stomach, the trail of hair beneath his navel, disappearing beneath navy boxers. Seven twenty. Seven twenty-one. Seven twenty-two. Akira’s shape forms long shadows over Tobio’s skin, silhouette backlit by the gold of morning.</p><p>Tobio’s already flushed and breathing fast when Akira’s fingers hook onto the waistband of his boxers, eyes dark above him. Akira looks like a saint, hair sleep-wild and haloed by light. “Seven twenty-four,” he says, quiet, before pulling the boxers down Tobio’s thighs.</p><p>“Akira,” Tobio says, voice low. Akira touches him and Tobio’s breath stutters. “<em>’Kira. </em>”</p><p>Tobio watches Akira take more of him and gathers a fistful of his hair, hips bucking up. He tilts his head back against the pillows, Akira’s name cut-up and desperate on his lips. Akira, ‘Kira, ‘Ra. ‘Kira, please, ‘Kira please, please</p><p>                                            please, please</p><p>                                                             Akira,</p><p>                                                        please</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tobio’s roommate loved the works of Italo Calvino, a famed writer in Italy who died in Siena. The night Tobio arrived he’d pressed a worn paperback of <em> Invisible Cities </em> into Tobio’s hands, had told him <em> questo è per te, per te</em>.</p><p>In the book, a charming Marco Polo narrates tales from his travels to a bored emperor. At one point the emperor asks him why, after all the ethereal cities he recounts in his stories, he never says anything about Venice. Venice his home, Venice his first love. Marco Polo hardly paused before replying, <em> every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice. </em></p><p>“Tell me about Rome,” Akira says, warm and close to Tobio’s ear.</p><p>Tobio used to sit in the <em>  Parco Savello </em> and listen to sweet strums of guitar in the evening, a wide floor of grass lined with fragrant orange trees. From the garden’s stone-walled edge, the rest of Rome unfurled like a yellowed photograph. All ancient roofs interspersed with stone pines, and then a jade river.</p><p>Every night the sodium lamps, flickering on. Every night the red sun, dipping west of Rome and pulling with it all the sky’s blue. Akira was always there, a perfect square of colour at the centre of its leaving. Akira pulled in tandem with red, with lilac, sinking deeper and deeper in saturation until he and everything else had turned all dark.</p><p>Tobio tells Akira, “It’s like you were there.”</p><p>Akira looks at him, eyes widened a fraction. “Is that so?”</p><p>Every orange grove in Rome. Every stone pine and portrait and cobblestone and angel. The stained glass Madonna pouring cobalt into a gilded cathedral. Every curling road and river ended at one person’s feet.</p><p>“Every time I describe Rome,” Tobio starts, voice heavy in his throat. “I’m saying something about you.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Do you remember all those places I told you about?”</p><p>“Yes. Of course I do.”</p><p>The fluorescents of Haneda airport are just as yellow and gaudy as Tobio remembers them being. But no type of light looks bad on Akira, whose skin reflects everything like moonstone, or marble.</p><p>Reflects everything—not just the light. Tokyo too. Sendai too, every city turned more beautiful by just the grace of him standing there. Tobio, too, feels more beautiful in his nearness. He knows the same will happen to Rome.</p><p>Tobio will love Akira and think him beautiful in Rome. He’ll love him in Venice. He loves him in Tokyo. He loved him in Sendai. Every city Tobio goes becomes the city in which he loves him.</p><p>“I want to see you in all of those places,” Tobio says, soft beside his ear. “I’ll take you to all of them.”</p><p>The sky slips through the airport’s glass walls, unfurls pink behind Akira. He fits his hand into Tobio’s and knits together their fingers. Tobio smiles against his ear, leans a little forward to brush a kiss along the top of Akira’s cheek. Hand in hand they walk down the long departure aisle, both wearing the sunset like a cape of coral silk. Both become more beautiful inside each other’s nearness.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>until there are</em><br/>
<em>no more cities and you pull me</em><br/>
<em>toward you, sliding your hands</em><br/>
<em>into my coat, telling me</em><br/>
<em>your name over and over, hurrying</em><br/>
<em>your mouth into mine.</em><br/>
<em>We have, each of us, nothing.</em><br/>
<em>We will give it to each other.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Carolyn Forché, For the Stranger</em>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>so much thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/elv4ss">elvi</a> for helping me with the Italian language and locations as well as cultural and artistic information, thank u to viv for formatting inspiration (also pls read <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25770127">her beautiful kunikage artist/muse au</a>!!!!), and thank u to <a href="https://twitter.com/_arcsec_">sarge</a> for beta reading last minute u are wonderful i love u so much ♡</p><p>and thank u!!! for reading this series and sharing your kind words and sticking around to the end ♡</p></blockquote></div></div>
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